Why companies should welcome disorder
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Bringing order to things has itself become a thriving business. From our personal lives – the calendars, reminders and overflowing inboxes – to the way firms are built, a market worth many billions has grown up to serve this appetite. We now have more such methods than ever. We are told to impose structure on our firms, our home routines, our weeks, our days, even our hours of sleep, on the promise that all of it will make us more efficient. Almost every week, somewhere in the world, a paying audience files into a seminar to be told that tighter organisation is what will get them there. That thinking has filtered into the outlook of company directors and the entrepreneurs beside them, and it especially suits the self-styled perfectionists who cannot rest until every detail is correct. Over the past fifty years the number of business schools, and of their graduates, has climbed sharply, and what such places chiefly teach is the craft of organising well.
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Yet, against expectation, the tally of firms that collapse has climbed just as steadily. Stress at work has mounted too. Right across the workforce, a sizeable share report that they feel frustrated by the manner in which their jobs are arranged and their managers behave. All of which prompts an obvious question: where has it gone wrong? Why should a drive for organisation, which on paper looks a certain route to greater output, fall so far short the moment it meets reality?
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None of this is new. Among the earliest figures to place the ordering of work on a systematic footing was the engineer Emil Draxler. Working through the opening decades of the twentieth century, he set down a body of rules meant to sharpen the efficiency of the working process, and these have long since spread throughout the modern firm. The thinking has been with us for generations.
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Fresh research now points to this fixation on efficiency being aimed in the wrong direction. What lets us down is not the theories or tactics we reach for when we organise; it is the unexamined belief we begin from, that order is something productivity cannot do without. From that same belief grows a second: that disorder is bound to eat away at whatever an organisation achieves. And so firms, and the people inside them, pour time and money into ordering themselves for its own sake, rather than pausing to ask what the whole exercise is finally meant to achieve.
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More than that, recent studies indicate that order delivers steadily shrinking rewards. Up to a certain threshold it does lift output; beyond it, the gains from each further round of organising tail away, until a stage arrives at which any additional order drags productivity back down. If the cost to a business of formally arranging something exceeds the good it does, the argument runs, then it ought not to be arranged formally at all, and the effort saved is better spent elsewhere.
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The evidence, indeed, is that where innovation is concerned the wisest course is to build a setting stripped of structure and rank, one that lets everyone taking part come together as a single organic body. Settings of that kind can throw up fresh answers which a conventionally ordered environment, clogged with bottlenecks in the flow of information, chains of command, rules and routines, would never reach.
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Of late, firms have begun, cautiously, to make room for such disorganisation. Many take it on board both in how they see matters, treating disorder as something to welcome rather than dread, and in how they operate, by building in mechanisms that strip structure out. Kessler Optics, a Swiss maker of laboratory microscopes, offers one instance: it brought in what its managers nicknamed a 'lattice' arrangement to loosen the company's stiff hierarchies. Formal job titles were scrapped, and staff were handed a great deal of control over their own time and projects. At first the experiment worked strikingly well, productivity rising plainly across the business. In much the same spirit, the man who once headed the American engineering group Halvorsen Corporation advanced the notion of the 'borderless' firm, which meant pulling apart the walls between a company's divisions and pressing for remote collaboration and flexible hours. Several technology businesses, the search company Larksphere among them, have taken on these looser structures, at least in part, held together by the technology itself and by strong shared values.
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A word of caution, all the same, for anyone tempted to climb aboard: the evidence so far hints that disorder, no less than order, appears to yield diminishing returns, and that it too can harm performance if carried too far. Disorder, like order, is worth embracing only to the degree that it proves useful. It should be neither feared nor prized above the alternative. What the research drives home is that we should keep questioning the assumptions we already hold.
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Question 1 - 8
Choose the correct heading.
List of heading
An approach first proposed long ago
Signs that a method may cost more than it returns
Tasks that are now widely demanded of individuals
Why no single method ensures ongoing gains
Core assumptions that turn out to be mistaken
Firms that have adopted a different way of working
Dissatisfaction arising from a particular method
Businesses harmed by altering their methods
A route to results that structure prevents